I Don't Want to Get Him
by GoldenRoya
Summary: In an unguarded moment, Jaime shares Orwell's origin story with Vince.


_Take it as given that Jaime Fleming has admitted her name to Vince and he's gotten over the fact that she's Peter Fleming's daughter. Just... given. Okay? Thanks. I don't own The Cape, and be forewarned, you're likely to cry. I just about did, and I _wrote_ the darn thing. _

* * *

"I was sixteen."

Vince sat up as much as was possible in the hammock strung between the carnival poles. He craned his neck over the side to stare at Jaime - it was still odd to think of her by that name. "What?"

Jaime wasn't looking at him, her attention engrossed with the scarf in her hands. "When Orwell first started. I was sixteen."

"Oh." Vince didn't know what to say, sinking back into the confines of the hammock. "That was...young."

Jaime's voice continued, curiously lonely as the only sound under the big top. "I was proficient at computers from an early age; I was practically programming as soon as I could read. Hacking came as almost second nature to me. I don't... I don't know why it took me so long to think of hacking my dad's system. NATO, sure, why not? It was fun. But Dad...

"He was a good father, mostly. He... I loved him, Vince. Always looked up to him. He was... he was larger than life. A hero. A god. And he was mine. I worshiped him, I really did. Every time he managed to get off of work early, he would come to see me. We," and here she sniffed and surreptitiously scuffed the side of her hand across her eyes, "We used to go out for ice cream. I always had to try a different flavor, but Dad never got anything but butter pecan. With a cherry on top. He never ate the cherry, but he always ordered one. I used to steal it off the top of his cone. I thought I was being sneaky. Well, sneaky for a seven year old, anyway. Dad knew. I knew he knew, and he knew that I knew that he knew, but we pretended that we didn't. I don't know when we stopped pretending. When we stopped actually knowing who the other person was."

Her words dried up, and Vince foundered about for a good response. "That's... a usual symptom of growing up," he offered, half-heartedly. Jaime gave him a sad little smile that thanked him for trying and got back on track.

"It started out as an exercise. We'd just been covering economics in school, and I got interested. Well, we'd always had money, and I'd always taken it for granted. Fish don't think about water, rich kids don't think about finances. It was a given fact of life. But I got curious. Of all the things we'd been learning about in class, where did my money come from?

"It was supposed to be simple. Hack into Dad's financials, look stuff up. But his money was buried in Ark, and so I looked there. And Ark... Well, you know what it turned into. It was pretty much the same, back in the day. Smaller, but the same. Clean, when you look at the surface. But I found a loose thread. A column that didn't add up. That led to accounts that weren't what the registry said they were, a little clever bit of manipulation. Impressive, really. But... then there were accounts that were outright lies. And mystery money that just sort of appeared and disappeared at random. I backed out, protected my system from being noticed, and then dove back in. I was nose down in the numbers for three nights running. In the end, I traced about thirty percent of Ark's net income - _our_ net income - to untraceable sources, black holes that didn't let the data out. Dirty money, Vince. And then I started looking at transaction dates. The one just sort of jumped out at me; the night of my first high school dance, that Dad had had to miss because of a meeting. I cross checked the others. They weren't perfect matches, but over eighty percent happened on days that I knew my father had had some unusually long meeting, or phone calls at weird times, and before you ask, yeah, I cross checked it against his schedule.

"I didn't want to believe it at first. So I waited. Watched. Set up a system that sent Ark's and my father's financial information to my laptop, and so that I could watch my father's schedule and phone calls. It was fishy. Not all of it, but enough... I could have taken it to the police right then. I should have. He'd have been arrested, and none of this would ever have happened, Chess would never have happened..." Jaime swallowed hard, took several deep breaths. Vince felt like he ought to get up and go to her, but, though Jaime was a relative stranger to him, he knew Orwell, and Orwell would want to be left alone to regain her composure.

After about a minute, Jaime huffed a breath through her nostrils in a sigh. "I was an idiot. Well, most sixteen year-olds are. I thought... There was a meeting coming up, a big one. From everything I was reading, it was the one that would take my family and turn it from a pretty wealthy one to one that was so obscenely rich we could afford our own moderately sized city." Vince caught a bit of motion through the weave of the hammock and tilted his head just enough to see Jaime waving an ironic hand to indicate which city she thought her father had bought. "It was also as dirty and underhanded as anything he'd ever dealt with. I mean, I'd thought what he'd done before was bad, but this... this made everything else seem like deals made in front of the pearly gates.

"In retrospect, I should have confronted him about it. Demanded his explanation. Told him not to do it. But that would have meant admitting I'd hacked his system. That I'd been spying on him. I was...too much of a coward to do that. So I made up a plan that would force Dad to back out of the deal, I thought. Right before it was supposed to happen, I called him. I told him, 'it's a matter of life and death. If you love me, you'll come, right now.' I begged. I threatened. I... I said some really stupid things, things I wish I could take back."

"And...?" Vince knew how it had played out, in the pit of his stomach, but his ears had to hear it.

Jaime's hands had twisted the scarf into an elaborate knot and she was now starting to stretch and pull it. "And he chose his business over me," she said, her calm voice belied by her stiff and shaking fingers. "I decided I couldn't keep using money that was got illegally; it made me feel tainted. So I left."

Vince blinked and hooked his chin over the edge of the hammock again. "Just like that?" he asked, incredulously.

The programmer nodded. "It was hard, at first. I didn't have the slightest clue how to get about on my own. Luck and a few good friends I met on the way really got me on my feet. But it wasn't enough, you know? Just because I wasn't using the money didn't mean that it wasn't still being taken. Even more, actually; my dad had his best people trying to track me down. I had a lot of narrow escapes. And I started to realize just how stupid I'd been. If I'd gone to the authorities when I had my first evidence, I could have stopped him. Once I realized that he needed to be stopped, he was beyond my scope. That was when I started Watching. To see if there was any way I could help... help mitigate some of the damage he was doing. To see if there was any way I could take him down."

Vince knew the rest of the story from there. The omniscient - or so it seemed - Orwell Is Watching, recruiting people through her website to do specialty work that she couldn't, to resist where possible, to spread truth and counter lies. "We'll get him, Jaime," he reassured her.

But she just shook her head. "You don't get it, Vince," she told him, loosening her hold on the scarf and letting it fall to the ground between her knees, soft folds of fabric gathering dirt from the circus tent floor. "I don't want to get him. I just want my daddy back."


End file.
